


Walking Around, Wasting Time

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Samurai Champloo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-19
Updated: 2007-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:58:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1630304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for Sigerson</p>
    </blockquote>





	Walking Around, Wasting Time

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Sigerson

 

 

_Lime blossoms!_  
Let's talk about the old days  
making dinner in the kitchen.  
-Basho

Fuu is watching Jin at the edge of the water.

It is long after the end of their journey, a while after they meet up again by chance, in another teahouse. He is still poor, still wandering. She is a waitress again. She's been watching him a lot lately; the pensive eyes, the careful movements, the soft billow of fabric over skin and bone and dignity. It is all so tightly wound around something like his soul, hiding behind stoicism and strength. He is pleasant to watch, his silver-quick movements like fish, and she finds herself wondering at the training that crafted this man

Yet, the weighted steps that had directed them across the island, over their journey, were carved from something more than training. She doesn't ask about Yukimaru, that betrayed samurai brother, or about the reason she had to nurse his skewered body back to health on Ikitsuki island; she doesn't have to ask, and Jin wouldn't have answered anyway. The rumors and the stolen snippets of conversation she encountered over the course of their journey are enough to fill in the blanks left by his silence. What is still left blank for her, is the way his guilt and sadness have taken over his training, the mantra in his head that should remind him of the constant thread connecting "being awake" and "saying goodbye." But for all the Zen that informs Jin's every breath-step-heartbeat, Fuu sees him living somewhere very removed from "the Now."

This, Fuu understands. Her Christian father taught her to live for the future: good deeds, deep prayers, salvation. Fuu understands goals and momentum, propulsion and doing today what will affect tomorrow. What she doesn't understand is Jin's state of suspended animation -- not the patient wait for the arrow to loose itself, but the stubborn refusal to step out of a distracting past.

She looks up from her thoughts as Jin dives into the lake and lets the water swallow him whole, moment eating moment.

***

_A bee_  
staggers out  
of the peony.  
-Basho  


The first time Fuu forces herself to forget about the future, she strips down in the dim light of Moronobu's studio.

She is cold and nervous, but flattered, too. Moronobu likes the way she looks ("Beautiful," he whispers as she unwraps her obi, slips her kimono from one shoulder, "beautiful."). She likes the way he looks at her: sleepy eyes, painted lips, the long fingernails of an artist. He makes her feel warm, despite the drafty building, despite her rapidly decreasing dress. It is silly and childish, this need for attention, for admiration, but it has been so long since her mother has held her close and stroked her hair, or brought her breakfast and said how lovely she was, how much she looked like her father. So she takes it where she can get it.

She knows Jin and Mugen would laugh at her, and she does feel a little dirty ("But it's exciting, too," she whispers to herself as she turns away from him to reveal a long, pale back, "and I like it."). So she decides she'll never tell her bodyguards. And she can pray later. It will be okay.

Moronobu glances up through long eyelashes, stares a bit longer than necessary at her bared skin, at the curve of her cheek, the way her eyes catch his and she fights down that girlish urge to turn away in shyness. He smiles, slow and soothing, assurance that she is doing fine, and she can almost swear that she sees him blush. She lets her kimono slip a little lower.

As he returns his gaze to his work, she watches him in the firelight. His eyes are intent on his work. His cheeks are flushed with the cold, with the sight of the lovely, timid girl in front of him, and his brush licks up the canvas, slow and sensuous, a lover eating time like the tender flesh of a peach.

***

_Summer is over and_  
we part, like eyelids,  
like clams opening.  
-Basho  


Shinsuke is another story. And Fuu tries to convince herself to stop hanging around with these strange young men.

She's holed up with the pickpocket and they can hear the ruckus outside. Fuu is aware of each passing moment, not because of the way they stretch on, tight like the strings of an instrument. Rather, she is aware of them because of how quickly they fly past -- a dying shooting star, the scent of flowers, the slide of money from an unguarded pocket.

At first, she thinks he doesn't want her there. ("Stupid girl," he mutters when she cleans and patches his wounds, "watch what you're doing.") But any time she looks to be moving for the door, he looks at her with quickening panic in his eyes and she rushes to assure him that she is going nowhere.

Shinsuke doesn't mention his mother, but he doesn't have to. He doesn't mention the regrettable things he's been doing lately, offers no apology, but when Fuu rests her fingertips against his cheek, he doesn't stop her.

She touches him, hesitant at first, then curious. He is young like her, and she can picture her own mother in the way she's seen his stretched out, weak and ill. Even though she knows it's hopeless, she thinks that maybe, had the brief moments they shared been different... Her heart beats fast in her chest, each pounding thud consuming another fleeting moment in the cramped space of their hideout.

He doesn't stop her, either, when she presses a kiss to the bridge of his nose. Instead he seems to welcome it in the way his body relaxes under her touch. And Fuu feels time gradually whine to a stop as he reaches a hand to her face and kisses her mouth. Her racing heart slows, too.

And it's all so useless. Shinsuke is going to die. His mother is going to die. They all are going to die, but when Shinsuke's hand slides around to cup the back of her head, she feels time savoring them both and she forgets, for a moment, to worry about what comes next.

***

_New Year's morning --_  
everything is in blossom!  
I feel about average.  
-Issa  


Mugen, of course, isn't like any of them.

He doesn't remind Fuu of her father. He doesn't make her feel beautiful. He doesn't want her, even in a grudging adolescent way. All of her interactions with Mugen happen second-hand through Jin, always vicarious.

But he makes her aware of herself in a way that she hasn't been since she was very small and the neighborhood boys picked on her incessantly. She is constantly checking that her hair doesn't look stupid, that her kimono doesn't make her breasts look too small, that she doesn't trip over something and land on her face. ("Pfft," Mugen snorts as he passes her at the hot springs and she clutches a towel to her naked body, "like you have anything to hide.")

She thinks that, if this is a crush, then she wants no part of it!

Still, she's so aware of his presence all the time. He keeps her on edge. She tries to laugh cutely around him, tries to be flirty with other men, hopes that he's around when she slips into the water for a bath. None of it ever recaptures the thudding, seductive energy of being watched by Moronobu, or of feeling Shinsuke's hands touch her and welcome her inside him for such a brief moment. This feeling is somehow hollower, more juvenile, but it occupies her all the same, each agonizing moment of it.

She fights him for the last dumpling on her plate. She drinks sake like an adult. She gambles. And, whiles she doesn't really like this daring woman she tries to become for him, and while she knows that she doesn't want to be that woman for very long, she does sort of like the feeling of grasping for fleeting moments with another woman's greedy, hungry hands.

***

_Blossoms at night,_  
and people  
moved by music.  
-Issa  


But the time Sara shows up, Fuu still carries a torch for both Jin and Mugen in a very girlish way, but the flame is dim.

Still, this doesn't stop the sake-hot sizzle in her gut when the blind woman plans to take one of them away. It's something like jealousy and Fuu tries to think of all the things her bodyguards have come to symbolize for her, but she pushes those thoughts down and tries to remember the teachings that say all things just "are."

When she goes to see Sara that night, she intends to beg her to leave Jin and Mugen alone. She intends to be firm and unwavering, but confronting a blind woman is more difficult in practice than it is in theory. Sara is playing her shamisen, sad and mournful, and the moments seem to slow to the time of water, the suspended fall from a height, and Fuu feels her will deflate.

So she sits and listens. She sits and listens and doesn't announce her presence, but Sara begins to play as if she knows someone is there.

When the song is finished, they may talk; Fuu doesn't remember. They may argue, but Fuu doubts it. All she is certain of are Sara's fingers on her skin. They are rough and strong and they seem to know everything about Fuu ("Do you really need their attention that much," Sara asks, her mouth close to Fuu's ear, "how childish.") Sara doesn't need sight to push Fuu to the floor, to move over her body, to soothe any resistance from her. Because Sara is right.

And, for the first time since Moronobu, Fuu feels that someone knows, if not _her_ herself, then at lest what to say to her. Sometimes, that's enough. So, moments drip slow like honey as Sara kisses her into silence, as Sara undresses her, holds her, feels her with fingers, tongue, torso, and makes her feel everything else disappear. For a long, unseeing moment, Fuu is someone else's most important person, an admirable, delectable thing.

***

_The moon and the flowers,_  
forty-nine years,  
walking around wasting time.  
-Issa  


When Jin finally surfaces from the lake, still without fish, he is dripping, weighted, and annoyed. Fuu is glad for the moment that Mugen isn't there with them because Mugen always exacerbates already bad situations and the set of Jin's mouth indicates that he needs no more exacerbation at the present.

Fuu struggles to hide her stare, her warm blush. But even without his washed-away glasses, Jin misses nothing. ("You're staring," he says, as he strips out of his sopping wet hakama, "why.")

Fuu smiles, lets him settle next to her, and she unwraps the small bit of food she has brought in from town. They had planned to save it, but Jin's fishing skills are less than desirable, and they are hungry. They eat in silence. Jin is wet, but drying. Fuu is pleased with herself for slipping so easily back into his life, and she thinks it might be fun to take his hand, so she does. Jin doesn't stop her, but he does look at her for a moment as if to ask, "What next?" She doesn't answer him. She just smiles.   
They eat. They sit. After a while, they talk about the food, their journeys together and apart, Mugen. They don't talk about the dangerous parts (which limits how much they talk about Mugen). They don't mind the punctuating silences. And they don't release each other's hands.

Fuu finds that, with Jin, the moments don't speed by and they don't slow down. They just tick away, tiny incremental rotations of the Earth: seasons and harvest and hulled rice. And she likes it, each normal, uneventful moment of it. Because life is moments, eating moments, eating moments.

 


End file.
